To slay a Titan

Today we know the top-of-the-line card has 2,816 stream processing units, 176 texture units, and 64 ROPs. These core processing bits of the GPU are backed up by 4GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1250 MHz.

With these specs, AMD claims the R9 290X will deliver 5.6 Teraflops of compute performance and a clock speed up to 1000 MHz.

Along with these numbers, AMD also dropped a note that customers will get all the souped-up graphics power for $549 (about £339, AU$570). The Radeon R9 290X is available starting today.

Goliath's David?

AMD secured a strong foothold with next-gen gaming by supplying the GPUs and CPUs that power both the Xbox One and PS4.

Furthermore, AMD is trying to sway game developers into utilizing its Mantle programming interface to build games specifically made to take advantage of AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture.

But when it comes to the GPU race, AMD has been shrouded in the shadow of Nvidia's Titan. The R9 290X is AMD's attempt to change all that.

Although the R9 290X spins up to a significantly faster 1000 MHz clock speed compared to Titan's 876MHz, it seems to be lacking in a few regards, especially when Titan has 2GB more video RAM.

Nvidia's primetime card also has more cores in general with 2,688 single precision and 896 double precision CUDA cores, plus 224 texture units, and 48 ROPs.

If anything the R9 290X's specs fit more in line with the recently rumored specs of GeForce GTX 780 Ti, which is speculated to sell for $100 more than AMD's part at $650 (about £401, AU$675). No matter which GPU manufacturers wheelhouse you decide to go with, it's pretty clear you're going to be well served.